donate your old smart phones to assist people who are deaf blind up to July 31 2015

If you have any smart phones laying around, please donate them to Able Australia to support people who are deaf blind who use such smart phone technology to communicate via refreshable Braille displays.

a device that helps the blind navigate by tingling their tongues

Use your tongue with this device to detect objects/shapes, movement, and distance. Based on a pair of camera mounted glass’s, the person who is blind via a set of electrodes, in a mouth pice will sense what is going on in front of them via their tongue by bubble sensations. Has received approval in Canada, United States, and other places.

Apple highlights apps on the Apps Store that work well with voiceOver on iOs from iMore

Amazon is now sharing its voice recognition technology (Alexa)with developers

This sounds interesting. Alexa is currently in the Amazon Echo voice recognition assistant speaker. Unfortunately, the actual speaker doesn’t seem to be yet available in Australia. However, having Amazon expand its technology to other manufacturers will result in (hopefully) a range of accessible voice recognition technologies.

watchOS 2

New clock faces - 24 hour time lapsed faces from iconic places around the world, use your own photo or randomise photos by choosing an album.

New complications: complications data can be drawn directly from apps.

Time travel: use the digital crown to scroll to the previous day today or next day to look at what is happening at a particualr time in a complications: eg weather, calendar or news item you may have missed).

Night stand mode - automatically goes in to night stand mode when charger connected and Apple watch on its side, time will display when you touch the screen, or side/digital crown, and side button will stop and digital crown will snooze an alarm.

Better apps: apps run natively, can take advantage of hardware features in the watch (such as using the mic or internal speaker), improvements to existing apps including:

Mail - reply to mail.

Friends: add more multiple screens of friends with each screen up to 12 friends.

Apple music

3 months trial, $9.99 single or $14.99 USD family subscription. Available June 30 this year. Provides curated music (along side your own music), Beats1 radio, and Connect (where artists can connect with their followers). Without a subscription, can still listen to Beats1, see what artists are posting on connect, and listen to ads supported stations.

Available with iOS 8.4, watchOS via paired iPhone, Mac/PC via updated iTunes, and Android later on this year.

I’m not sure how Apple music will differ from such online streaming music services such as Pandora radio, and Connect to me sounds like the failed Ping social sharing function that was available in iTunes a number of years ago. With the 3 months trial certainly nothing to loose in giving it a go.

Tuesday, 9 June 2015

Just catching up with Talking Tech for the last two weeks, Google changed some options and MarsEdit which I use to do these blog posts didn’t work, and it has taken me a bit more time than expected to get back to updating the blog after Marsedit was fixed: hence blogs posts for Talking Tech for June 2 and 9 2015.

4. Improvements under the hood for better VoiceOver accessibility with 3rd party apps.

Vision Australia trialling remote training

Vision Australia has almost completed a trial of remote training for a selected group of clients. This pilot will allow Vision Australia to move forward in the future in providing remote training to clients in both desktop and mobile systems.